The Book of Dave (62 page)

Turning to look along the row of mourners, Dave saw a familiar profile etched against another – a juxtaposition that made
both faces more fleshy. It was a profile he'd been expecting to see – the arrogant flick of surfer hair, the ski-jump nose,
the pink glisten of well-irrigated skin. 'Gary was a man who loved his kids more than anything else,' the voice at the lectern
was saying; 'he put them before everything, and when he died he was climbing that wheel for little Jason and Amber.' Little
Jason was as big as his dad now
and I swear he's stoned.
The Fighting Father cleared his throat and consulted the text he'd prepared on the back of an envelope. 'I'm sorry, Dave,'
Phyllis hissed, 'but I can't take any more of this – I'm going.'

Dave left with her. Outside the chapel of rest the hearse was reversing on the gravel. It was a brand new TX2 that had been
chopped in half and the bodywork extended. Hand in hand, Dave and Phyllis near skipped down the Avenue of dwarf cypresses
– it was a little moment of levity before the burden of it all descended on them. Looking back, Dave saw that the Skip Tracer
had come outside and was standing in the porch, blotting his face with a brilliant mauve handkerchief. Dave thought he might
call after them; instead all he did was smile – a tight little grimace – and raise his hand for a valedictory chop. Dave Rudman
never saw a London taxi cab again without thinking of that hearse, obscene and elongated. He never saw a cab again without
picturing its passenger as a cadaver and its driver as a sullen undertaker.

When Christmas was past Dave took the two exercise books that had lain abandoned on top of a bookcase in the snug sitting
room. He put them in a Jiffy bag he'd bought at the newsagents in Chipping Ongar. He wrote a letter to accompany them on their
journey to the stranger who used to be his son.
Bloody odd – I know,
mate … might as well hear it from me. At the end of the day – you can
throw these away – or keep them
…
It's up to you
…
Don't want to
lay anything on you – I quite understand … it's difficult to explain …
So he didn't, only signed off:
I'm sorry – truly I am …
because at long last he truly was.

The daffodils stalked from the copses in January – the apple blossom burst before the end of February. Winter, outgunned,
retreated before the creeping, vegetative barrage. When the clouds rolled back, the sun had the switched-on intensity of a
sunlamp, its ultraviolet rays frazzling the new shoots. Towards Harlow big cock chimneys belched out smoke, and in the lanes
exhaust fumes lay in swathes, like the contrails of permanently grounded aircraft.

The cab-sale money was gone, and Dave looked for an earner. Driving a minicab was
only logical.
He applied to a couple of local outfits, and for the first time in months switched on his mobile phone. There was a text message
waiting for him that announced itself with a sterile chirrup. It was from Carl: 'Thanks 4 the lettuce.'

Dave drove Macedonians to pull potatoes and Poles to wrench onions. The unwelcome guest workers dossed down fifteen to a labourer's
cottage – or even in corrugated-iron barns on the farms. They clubbed together to hire Dave, so he could take them to the
supermarket, where they bought gut-rot booze. He needed little knowledge for these A-to-B runs, no gazetteer imprinted on
his cerebellum, no immemorial arrogance. So Dave drove stubbly old people to daycare centres and hairy housewives to be waxed.
He picked kids up from school because some mum had rolled over her 4wd, then endured their torment behind his back. He drove
City getters back from the tube terminus at Epping to their peculiar gated communities – crescents of modern semis, double-glazed,
red-roofed, and marooned in fifty-acre fields of oilseed rape, so bright yellow that they jaundiced the sky above.

'Support price is good,' the farmer, Fred Redmond, explained; except that to the minicab driver's ears his words sounded like
'Suppawt prys iss gúd,' because Redmond spoke an earthy Essex dialect. 'Folk are always moanin' on abaht the fucking E E Yew,
but I tellya, Dave, wivaht the subsidë awl this land would be owned by wun bluddë corporation or annuva.' Not that Redmond
was nostalgic about the past; he had a grown-up son who was a computer programmer in Toronto. 'And good-bluddë-luck to 'im.'
Nor did he view himself as some noble steward of the native sod: 'Thass awl bollix, I've grubbedup 'edjez an' sprayed pestyside
wiv the bess uv 'em.'

Even so, at first on short limps back from the pub – for Fred had a gammy leg – and then on longer stumps over fields and
through woods, the farmer – seemingly inadvertently – began to instruct the ex-cabbie in the naming of the parts.

At first it was the crops – the wind-dimpled expanses of young wheat, the feathery rows of barley, the rattling stooks of
alien maize. Then, as they wandered further, Fred Redmond deciphered the groves of crinkle-leafed oaks with their understorey
of spiky green broom, saw-leafed nettles and ferny bracken. Before he moved
out to the sticks,
Dave would have been hard pressed to tell a silver birch from an ash. Now he discovered himself affectionately stroking the
smooth bark of beeches and grateful for the whippy stalks of brambles, pricking him through his jeans into attention.

The pretty, yellow-gold furze flowers reminded Dave of posh, overprotected offspring, guarded by savage thorny fences. When
Dave commented on this, Fred drew his attention to rampaging banks of blackthorn – 'Fukkin pest – but good fer keepin' off
cattle' – before leading him down to the River Roding, a weedy rill that rived his own land, and showing him the mighty umbels
of the Giant Hogweed growing on its shady banks. 'Iss tock-sick,' the farmer explained, 'weird bluddë poison – í doan bovver
U when U rubbub against the stems – onlë layter when iss exposed to sunlyt.' Fred was charged with forcibly deporting these
ecological migrants who'd muscled in from the Caucasus in the past quarter-century, but, as he put it: 'MAFF don't givva toss
az long az the kiddies don't get 'urt. Beesyds – less I ware a fukkin space suit I get burned sumffing chronic cuttin' í dahn.'
He pulled up a moleskin trouser leg to show Dave the white patches where his leathery skin had swelled with gleet, then burst.

'Annuva fing,' Redmond continued as they trudged on through the meadows, the dew of late morning soaking them to the crotch
while blackbirds gorged in the hawthorn, 'iss served me well, the 'ogweed, iss lyke a letric fence – keeps folk offa my piggery.'
Not that there were many folk to be seen. It never stopped impinging on Dave that, despite the squawk of televisions from
behind leylandii and the ever-present roar of Japanese engines, once he stepped from the road there it was, the land, undulant
and encompassing, with shimmery poplars shading the river beds and damp alders trailing their limp, phallic catkins.

Dave took to walking across to Redmond's piggery so he could commune with the pinky-tan beasts that grubbed in the dust or
slumbered in their iron humpies. Looking at them from behind a taut, ticking strand of volts, he would allow himself to see,
what? Some humanity in their eyes, sunk deep in their fleshy snouts – some delicacy too in their arched legs and high-heeled
trotters. They would come snuffling up to him, and even though he knew he shouldn't – that such sentiments were inapposite
for the bacon of the near future – he found himself addressing them with the baby names he'd once bestowed on Carl: 'Little
Man' and 'Champ', 'Runty' and 'Tiger'. When he turned away the hogs ambled off, back to their muddy wallows.

As the summer days stretched out, Phyllis registered the change in Dave's state of mind.
Letting him get over it
had, she thought, been the right approach. He began to shave regularly, bought her bottles of the sweet German wine she liked
and brought her bunches of wild flowers back from his rambles. One night in July they made love for the first time in three
months; then spent, the two of them lying like beached porpoises on the salty mattress, she dared to murmur, 'It was prob'ly
better that way for him.'

'Better in what way?' He nuzzled up to her, a hand fanning over the broken blood vessels that gathered, like tributaries,
in the sunken valley at the small of her back. 'Better' – she hunkered up and pulled a pillow underneath her breasts – 'before
those Turks caught up with him – the heavy mob that was after him for the cab debt.' She feared she'd said too much, because
Dave rolled away from her and reached for his cigarettes on the bedside table. 'Them?' He spat fresh smoke and a rare gob
of cabbie nous. 'They wouldn't've done much to him, duffed 'im up a bit maybe – broke 'is nose. They want their money same
as everyone else – dead blokes ain't great earners.'

Was Phyllis too old for it? The thought had occurred to Dave when they started sleeping together, and she waved away the condoms
with their ludicrous packaging of a chastely smiling youthful duo.
She didn't say she was on the pill,
only that it wasn't necessary.
She still has her period, though
… it was irregular, that much he noticed – now that he was noticing things again, things outside of himself.
Best not push it …
Not that there was time they were out of time – more that
I gotta … accept what's happened
… I'm gonna be one of those blokes what doesn't have kids – not
ever.
He couldn't forbear from connecting this realization with his behaviour towards Carl.
It's payback time …
even though he couldn't understand who he'd borrowed from. There was no
cosmic fucking loanshark
that he believed in. Not like
Aunt Gladys
squeaking across the Mormon basketball court in her sneakers …
Devenish
an' his ill-gotten dosh …
Michelle even
with 'er creams an' slap
… They're all worshipping sumffing … like those fucking nutters
totalling themselves in Bagdad … It's only that they want a heaven here,
on earth.

At the back of the moat that half circled the old castle mound, a meadow unfolded and reached along to a little kids playground
tucked in the far corner of a cricket pitch. Sitting on a bench sacred to the memory of a former Redmond, Dave Rudman meditatively
stroked the bare ground left behind by his botched hair transplant. Dense thickets of furze and brambles extended along the
edges of the field, and from these rabbits came hesitantly hip-hopping – first ones and twos, then, when this advance guard
detected no danger, threes and fours. A brace of crows staggered to the ground near by, and the rabbits retreated. A bird
scarer half a mile away went off with a flat 'bang', and the crows limped aloft. The rabbits came sniffing back. In the lolloping,
furtive boogie of the animals, their ear-flick and paw scratch, Dave divined soft answers to the hard questions that assailed
him.

After watching the rabbits for ten minutes or so, as the sun tugged up to its zenith, Dave noticed a sinister focus to their
botheration – a glistening scrap on the turf that had also attracted a twister of flies. Strolling over from the bench, he
found the broken necklace of vertebrae on its offal display cushion; other trinkets – the skull with semiprecious eyes, the
ribcage like a gory tiara – lay a few paces off, surrounded by the parched shot of rabbit droppings.
Don't
push it. .
.
Let her come to you . .
.
She's 'ad enough drama in her life.

A shadow fell across the dead rabbit and Dave looked up to find Fred Redmond standing there with a shotgun broken over his bare
arm. 'You … did you?' Dave didn't want to sound like a townie bleeding heart. 'Nah.' Redmond was offhand. 'Cooduv bin
a fox – feral cá eevun. Eyem nó in ve abbit uv dissembowlin em. Still,' he continued, guiding Dave to the far side of the field
with his free arm, 'vare a bluddë menniss, vay ar, lookí ve way awl viss bank eer iz riddulled wiv vare burrös – vayl av ve
ole pitch subsydin if we doan keep em dahn. U shúd cumaht lampin wiv me wun nyt – gimme an and.'

Dave wasn't keen on the idea at all. But Phyllis said, 'Why don't you? It's the company he's after – since his wife died he's
been on his own a lot. Besides, he's been a good neighbour to me and Steve over the years – not like some of the others round
here. He's come over and done bits and bobs in the cottage – it'd be good if we could do something for him in return.'